tempus fugit

Quote of the Day: Rakem Balogun, falsely charged with “Black Identity Extremism”: “It was like living like a dog confined to a small backyard.”

2018-05-11

Rakem Balogun (Christopher Daniels) is a relatively young man, with a son and daughter, and he was a stranger to violence, although he did own a gun. He had never advocated that policemen should be killed or made any threats, but unbeknownst to him, the FBI had him under surveillance for some time and internally labelled him a “black identity extremist.” He was arrested– a full-on bulletproof vest and shotgun no-knock warrant– in December and held in jail for five months while his case– he was charged with one count of owning a gun while being ineligible because of a prior misdemeanor domestic violence conviction– fell apart and was dismissed. In the meantime, he lost his house and his car, but fortunately not his job; he works in IT (I guess that means programming computers; that’s what we’d call it in the old days.)

Mr. Balogun’s son (fifteen) had to transfer to a different school, and he didn’t get to see his newborn daughter unless he was exonerated. Believe it or not, the FBI insisted that he couldn’t get any bail because he represented a risk of committing further crimes while out on bail. His case should be lifted up and examined in the hot spotlight of public opinion and people should know that there is a racist element in the FBI that has invented “black identity extremism” to categorize a theorized wave of crimes against police, most obviously the assassination of five police officers at a demonstration recently. This fromForeign Policy describes the “Black Identity Extremist”:

“The terrorism classification is used to describe individuals who resort to violence or unlawful activities “in response to perceived racism and injustice in American society,” according to a copy of the report obtained and published by Foreign Policy.”

There is, of course, a tradition among “black identity extremists” of defiantly owning guns to combat perceived effeteness. A copy of the book “Negros with Guns” was also seized when Daniels was arrested. The Black Panthers were treated as armed threats because many of them were, in fact, armed. Now the police have “Black Lives Matter” to worry about, and they have developed some conspiracy theories about “BLM”, partly involving the so-called organization behind it. Unfortunately, the man they picked for an example (the technique of arresting lower level members of a gang to gain access to upper levels with confessions) was so low he didn’t have any connections worth exploiting or organizations that used mafia-type techniques on their members. So they ruined his life for nothing and got no cooperation to use against really extreme extremists like Malcolm X.

Update: the FBI had been keeping Daniels under surveillance since March 2015, when he was identified in a video of a public demonstration against police brutality that was shown on the Infowars web site. Infowars, in case you forgot, is the site that promotes the most outlandish conspiracy theories. One of their theories was that the “Black Lives Matter” demonstrators were part of a secret network that amounted to a fifth column of anti-police black people who were likely to commit “domestic terrorism.” The twisted worldview of right wing conspiracy theorists is hard to penetrate.